Forum for Science, Industry and Business

About Delta Debugging

06.08.2001

Delta Debugging automates the scientific method of debugging. The basic idea of the scientific method is to establish a hypothesis on why something does not work. You test this hypothesis, and you refine or reject it depending on the test outcome. When debugging, people are doing this all the time. Manually. Delta Debugging automates this process. Read more...

Narrowing down possible failure causes

As a first application, consider a program that fails when given some input. With Delta Debugging, you can isolate and minimize the failure-inducing input automatically. For instance, if your browser crashes on a 10,000-line WWW page, Delta Debugging can determine the failure-inducing HTML tag. Read more...

As another application, consider a program and a number of changes to the program code. After applying the changes, the program no longer works. With Delta Debugging, you can identify the failure-inducing changes automatically. Read more...

Yet another application is the isolation of failure-inducing executed statements - that is, the events during execution which were critical for producing the failure. This work is at an early stage. Read more...

Further applications are the identification of failure-inducing schedules (e.g. race conditions due to nondeterministic behavior) or the isolation of failure-inducing control statements (i.e. which branches taken were relevant and which not).

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Physicists of the University of Würzburg have made an astonishing discovery in a specific type of topological insulators. The effect is due to the structure of the materials used. The researchers have now published their work in the journal Science.

Topological insulators are currently the hot topic in physics according to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Only a few weeks ago, their importance was...

In recent years, lasers with ultrashort pulses (USP) down to the femtosecond range have become established on an industrial scale. They could advance some applications with the much-lauded “cold ablation” – if that meant they would then achieve more throughput. A new generation of process engineering that will address this issue in particular will be discussed at the “4th UKP Workshop – Ultrafast Laser Technology” in April 2017.

Even back in the 1990s, scientists were comparing materials processing with nanosecond, picosecond and femtosesecond pulses. The result was surprising:...

A multi-institutional research collaboration has created a novel approach for fabricating three-dimensional micro-optics through the shape-defined formation of porous silicon (PSi), with broad impacts in integrated optoelectronics, imaging, and photovoltaics.

Working with colleagues at Stanford and The Dow Chemical Company, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fabricated 3-D birefringent...

In experiments with magnetic atoms conducted at extremely low temperatures, scientists have demonstrated a unique phase of matter: The atoms form a new type of quantum liquid or quantum droplet state. These so called quantum droplets may preserve their form in absence of external confinement because of quantum effects. The joint team of experimental physicists from Innsbruck and theoretical physicists from Hannover report on their findings in the journal Physical Review X.

“Our Quantum droplets are in the gas phase but they still drop like a rock,” explains experimental physicist Francesca Ferlaino when talking about the...